


Origin Stories: Project Black Book

by Bronzeinferno, surlydruid



Series: The Redacted Files of Project Blackwing [1]
Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Non-Graphic Violence, Project Blackwing (Dirk Gently), Project Blackwing Origins, Warnings May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-28
Packaged: 2019-07-01 09:08:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 16,626
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15771006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bronzeinferno/pseuds/Bronzeinferno, https://archiveofourown.org/users/surlydruid/pseuds/surlydruid
Summary: Following the end of World War II, the United States government launched Operation Paperclip to recruit foreign scientists to the CIA, to head up a covert operation known as Project Black Book. As far as the public was to be concerned, these scientists, with heavy military aid, sought out and examined alleged Soviet spies that had infiltrated American society. What they found went far beyond Soviet technology. In actuality, they studied people with strange abilities that could not be explained by any advanced scientific theories. Black Book documented a wide range of abilities the likes of which had never been seen, and soon discovered these people to be global phenomenon. Once nearly a dozen subjects had been apprehended, Project Black Book was re-designated Project Blackwing.As of June 12, 1995, Blackwing security was overrun, leading to the mass escape of all 50 Projects. It was decided that the Projects would be allowed to return to society, but that Blackwing would continue to monitor them from a distance. After serious funding cuts, attention shifted to primarily focus on Projects Icarus and Incubus.These are the restricted files of Project Blackwing.





	1. Project Mot

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Drug use, some violence, kidnapping

_December 18th, 1965_

It was Doug Cassady’s 17th birthday, and he was planning on celebrating in a most spectacular way. There had been rumors for the past couple months about parties, first in San Jose and then Muir Beach. Flyers had appeared, asking in bold letters “CAN YOU PASS THE ACID TEST?” The rumors had it that in addition to live music, all those who attended were given some truly spectacular drugs, lifted straight off of the CIA. Doug wasn’t so sure about that last part, but it sure would be cool if it was true. The flyers had appeared in Palo Alto yesterday, and Doug and his friends had agreed that they would go, in celebration of another successful trip around the sun. At lunch they had conferred and bought what they deemed an appropriate amount of weed, and stuffed it deep in Doug’s backpack. Once the final bell rang, the six of them had hopped on their bikes and headed for their favorite secluded smoking spot to light up before the big show tonight. 

“So, what’s everybody heard about these drugs they’ve got at the test?” Eddie was sitting cross-legged on the ground, rolling up joints for everyone. He had the most nimble fingers in the group, so he usually got stuck on rolling duty. His long, supremely curly hair was tied back in a loose knot behind his head so he could see what he was doing, but he barely even needed to look down as he industriously tapped the bud into the papers and brought it up to his lips to seal them.

“Not much, just that they make you see shit weird. Like weed, but even better.” Doug was running his hands through his already messy hair and leaning against a tree. He was far too fidgety to roll his own joint. His thin fingers were restless unless he had a pen in them, they had been for as long as he could remember. He was always writing or doodling in the margins of his notebooks during class, he just couldn’t help it. But it bothered his friends when he scribbled while they were hanging out, and he did need his hands to smoke, after all, so he had put his pen and sketchbook away. 

“I heard it, like, totally messes with your senses. Like makes you hear colors and stuff.” 

“Well that just sounds like bullshit. What do colors sound like Josh?” Corey and Josh had claimed the best rock for sitting on and were leaning on each other, back to back, with their feet sticking out on opposite ends of the big, conveniently flat rock, staring up at the clouds. They could argue over the smallest things, but it was always in a friendly way. Doug figured that they just did it for sport, like an attempt to keep themselves sharp at all times. Both of them would pick arguments with others just as quickly as with each other, as well. They were every teacher’s worst nightmare, due to their ability to derail any topic of a lecture for, at a record best, twenty minutes at a time. The school had stopped putting them in classes together in their sophomore year, after too many teachers had complained. Doug liked to listen to them spar though, it was usually so petty that it got ridiculous. 

“Maybe it just sounds like bullshit to you because you’ve never experienced it, man. Maybe you just need to try the drugs to find out what colors sound like.” Eliot was sitting leaning against the pile of backpacks that had been tossed near a tree. His hands were folded behind his head, and his fluffy blond hair was sticking up in about a million different directions, blown around by the slight breeze. Miles was sitting between Eliot and Eddie, closing up the circle, quietly drumming on his physics textbook with drumsticks that he had let Doug doodle on, humming to himself. The bikes were resting in a heap next to the rock, outside the perimeter of the circle. It was somehow instinctual for them to form a ring like this when they smoked. It looked, to Doug, like some ancient ritual. Though if it were, he mused to himself, they would be surrounding the stone altar, not sitting on it. And they would have brought some sort of sacrifice.

Eddie passed the joints around, and they each took one. Lighters were pulled out and handed to those who had forgotten or misplaced their own, and there was a brief moment of quiet as they all let out the first few puffs of smoke. A fit of coughing followed, and then just quiet for a few more minutes while they all lost themselves in what they were doing. Finally, Josh broke the silence, by giving a long-winded explanation of what he thought the blue of the sky sounded like, which Corey promptly informed him sounded like bullshit. Miles held his joint in his lips and blew the smoke out his nose so he could keep drumming. Eliot and Eddie occasionally chimed in to keep Corey and Josh arguing. Doug watched in comfortable silence. He was thinking about how he would describe this scene, or maybe how he could sketch it. He wanted to capture this nice moment of comradery on his birthday, to remember it forever. 

After a few hours of sitting around smoking and talking, they picked up their backpacks and bikes and headed off to the Big Beat, where the flyers had said the Acid Test would be held. They left their bikes and backpacks at Josh’s house on their way, as it was the closest, and walked the remaining blocks to the club. The sun had begun setting while they biked, and it was nearly dark by now. They got inside, and were immediately struck by the colorful lights and fluorescent paint on the walls and floors. They were handed glasses of bright, almost violently pink kool aid, which Doug saw quickly that most people in the ballroom had in their hands already. He took his cup of punch and took a tentative sip. It didn’t taste weird, as far as he could tell, but the rumors they had heard at school had said something about the “electric kool aid” being drugged. He looked at his friends, one by one, and they all came to an unspoken agreement at once. They touched their cups together, and all drank deeply. A few people around them cheered the boys on. When they came up from their drinks, the cups were drained, and the boys had huge grins on their faces. They plunged off into the middle of the crowd as the band were welcomed onto the stage. They were a group of boys who barely looked older than Doug and his friends, and they called themselves the Grateful Dead. They took up their instruments and music began to fill the room. The tune was upbeat and fun, and the lights danced and changed colors with the music. Doug felt himself pulled into motion as the first words hit his ears.

_See that girl, barefootin' along, whistlin' and singin', she's a carryin' on! There's laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet! She's a neon-light diamond and she can live on the street! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day!_

The crowd moved wildly along with the music, and Doug felt his friends moving along with him, felt their energies bouncing off of him and his own energy reaching out to touch them. He reached an arm out and wrapped it around Eddie, closest within his reach. They grinned enormous smiles at each other and then let go to keep moving as the music went through them. The lyrics filled Doug with a sense of pure joy like he could not remember ever having felt before. 

_Well everybody's dancin' in a ring around the sun! Nobody's finished, we ain't even begun! So take off your shoes, child, and take off your hat. Try on your wings and find out where it's at! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day!_

Doug felt a compulsion to take off his shoes but was stopped by the fact that he wanted to keep dancing, and undoing his laces would’ve made him pause and bend down. A deep part of his brain could sense that putting his head down in the middle of a large crowd was dangerous and a bad idea, but mostly he just wanted to keep moving. The music would not wait for him, and he refused to be left behind.

_Take a vacation, fall out for a while, summer's comin' in, and it's goin' outa style. Well lite up smokin' buddy, have yourself a ball. Cause your mother's down in Memphis, won't be back 'till the fall. Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day! Hey hey! Hey, hey Come right away! Come join the party every day!_

__

The band let the music bleed from the first song into the next, slowing the pace down considerably, and the energy in the room seemed to calm with the music. Doug felt himself slowing down, though he was still moving in the same swaying way he had been before. His arms trailed graceful loops through the air, and he saw rainbow colored trails behind them. He was utterly mesmerized, and words began to float into his ears while his eyes glowed with light.

_Last leaf fallen bare earth where green was born. Black Madonna two eagles hang against a cloud. Sun comes up blood red wind yells among the stone! All graceful instruments are known._

Doug’s mind was working overtime trying to record all of the information that was flooding his senses. He could quite clearly picture a scene of a blood red sun rising out of the floor in front of him, two eagles circling above it and then orbiting it as it hung above the dance floor. Yes, he thought, I do know all graceful instruments. He felt that he was himself one of these graceful instruments, though he could not explain what that meant. New words floated into his brain.

_When the windows all are broken and your love's become a toothless crone. When the voices of the storm sound like a crowd. Winter morning breaks, you're all alone!_

Doug was now watching rainbow trails come off the band as they swayed with their instruments. He could feel something forming inside of him as he watched, but for all that he was good with words he could not describe this feeling. It was bigger than him, bigger than this crowd or this club or this city. He couldn’t sense an end to it. It felt like the universe was pouring some part of itself into him as he was lost to the music. The singer seemed to stare directly into Doug’s eyes as he began the next verse. 

_The eyes are blind, blue visions, all a seer can own. And touching makes the flesh to cry out loud. This ground on which the seed of love is sown. All graceful instruments are known!_

Doug felt as if he was bursting with light, like it was streaming out of his eyes in swirls of neon color. He had lost track of where in the crowd he was, but he could still feel the energies of his friends somewhere pretty close by. They had all spread out, not paying attention to which way they were moving. He looked back up at the stage, where the band kept moving fluidly through the song. A hand fell suddenly on his shoulder, and Doug spun around, expecting one of his friends, excited to share what he was feeling with whoever it was. But he did not recognize the face that stared back at him. It was an older man, in a dark suit with close-cut hair and a serious expression which was completely at odds with their surroundings. Doug could feel a cold energy coming off this man, and as deep as he searched the man’s eyes, he couldn’t seem to find joy or light in them. 

The man held up a badge, and mouthed something to Doug, but he couldn’t hear what the man was telling him. His mind raced through a series of highly unlikely reasons that could have landed him under arrest. He looked wildly around the room for his friends, trying to see if he was the only one who was facing a dark suit. He could see more dark suited people moving through the crowd towards him, or maybe he just felt their cold, piercing energy cutting through the warm swirling energies of the crowd. They were like knives slicing through Doug’s newfound sense of joy. He imagined that the light that had been streaming out of his eyes stopped in its curling path, and began to run down his cheeks like tears. He reached a hand up to his face to check for rainbow tears, and felt the water there. 

There was a sharp icy feeling right behind him, and a moment later he felt his arms wrenched back and something metallic touched his wrists. Handcuffs, he thought. This is really happening, he was really being arrested for some reason. The terror began to fill Doug so completely that he lost control of his senses entirely for a minute. He wasn’t sure, because he couldn’t hear a thing over the pounding in his ears, but he thought he might have been screaming. The energy in the room around him was changing, and starting to circle around him in a way that made him even more intensely uncomfortable. He knew on some level that he was thrashing against the person or people that were holding him, that his feet had left the ground as they lifted him up to take him away from this place, his friends, away from the joy he had been feeling just a few minutes ago. 

The fear reached a peak inside of him and Doug felt something click into place in his brain. Suddenly images were flashing in front of him, people he knew, people he didn’t, and himself. As he let the scenes play in his head, he watched himself grow older. He saw himself restrained in a white room, hooked up to some kind of machine. He saw himself with the beginnings of a beard, in a jumpsuit of some kind, being dragged down a long darkened hallway. He saw himself being interrogated by someone in a dark suit. He saw a slideshow of faces that he did not recognize, that flew before him too quickly to get a good look at any of them. He saw children and teenagers fleeing, jumping over a fence and tearing holes in it for each other, scattering in every direction. As he watched the little figures spread out in front of him, the song came back into his mind. “All graceful instruments are known.”  


The next thing he knew, Doug was in the back of a van, being driven away from his friends, his life, everything he had known up until this point. The images had changed, and now he saw an older man, familiar but still unknown to him, surrounded by open notebooks that were all filled to different points with handwriting that Doug knew he could place if he could look at it more closely. He wanted to know what was written in those books. As the van took him farther and farther from home, and as the terror he felt began to die down and be replaced by a duller dread, he felt the images begin to fly out of his head. He longed to record what he had seen, he felt his fingers twitching for a pen, a paintbrush, something that he could use to get what he had seen out of his head and into the world. 

An unknown amount of time passed in the moving vehicle, and Doug could feel the drugs he had taken that night working their way out of his system. He felt himself grow sober as the van continued on its path, and found himself wishing he could see out of the window so he could have some sort of idea where they were taking him. He wished he could wipe his face, too, but his hands were still cuffed behind his back. He was mildly embarrassed by how long he had cried after they had thrown him in the back of the van, but he kept reminding himself that most people would have done the same thing in this position. Rays of sunlight streamed in above him as morning broke, but they just kept driving. Doug wasn’t sure whether or not he stayed awake for the entire journey. It was possible that he fell asleep at some point, but he was too wired and simultaneously exhausted to tell the difference between dreams and visions swimming before his waking eyes. 

Eventually the van stopped moving, and dark-suited serious men pulled him roughly from the floor of the van and carried his limp body down a series of long, dark, seemingly identical hallways. They looked familiar, but Doug knew he had never been here in his life. The men carrying him stopped in front of a door, and someone who had evidently been walking behind them stepped around the man who held Doug under his left arm. This person was still in a dark suit, but her long hair was pulled into a tight bun behind her head, rather than being cut close to the scalp. She waved a card in front of the door, which whooshed open to reveal a dark room. Doug was carried inside, and set down on a narrow bed. The woman in the dark suit touched a button on the wall and lights came on in the ceiling. Doug blinked as one of the men undid the handcuffs on his wrist. He brought his arms around in front of him and rubbed his wrists where angry red marks stung on them. He rubbed at his face, and looked around the small room more carefully. There was a small closet with five identical jumpsuits hanging in it, and a shower stall that was just big enough for someone his size to clean off, but certainly not large enough to be called luxurious. 

He looked back at the woman, and she nodded towards the shower and closet, as if to tell him to clean off and get changed. She then turned sharply on her heel and left, the door closing behind her. The two men that had carried Doug in remained standing between him and the door. He bent down and untied his shoes and pulled them off along with his socks, then slowly got up, and tried to turn away from the men at the door as he pulled off his sweat-soaked t-shirt, and shimmied out of his jeans. He stepped into the shower stall and closed the door before shedding his briefs and tossing them over the door. He turned the water on, and for a full minute he lost himself in the feeling of the water washing over him. He stared down at his feet, watching the water run down his legs and into the drain. He blinked and stared harder at the shower floor, unsure of what he was seeing at first. It looked like the water was streaked with the colors of the rainbow, standing out brightly against the gray floor. He brought his hands up to his face again, and when he looked at his fingers he saw they were stained with bright colorful spots. He remembered the light he had imagined streaming out of his eyes while he had listened to the Grateful Dead sing, and suddenly wondered if that had been his imagination or if the dark suits had seen his glowing eyes as well. Had they seen everything that he had seen? Doug shook his head, and resolved to get answers about the disjointed visions of himself and the other children he had seen, the next time he saw the woman in her dark, severe suit.


	2. Project Moloch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Violence, electrocution, child abandonment

_November 9th, 1966._  
Project Mot, formerly known as Douglas Adams, screamed as an electric pulse was delivered to his temples. The scientists who had taken him on the night of his seventeenth birthday had been trying for nearly a year to trigger some psychic power that they believed he possessed. He couldn’t solve their little puzzles and tests, he couldn’t see petty things like that. The future didn’t reveal itself to him in minute ways like that. He couldn’t control when a vision would come to him, and in fact he hadn’t seen anything since the night they had taken him. But no matter how often he yelled this at the scientists, they wouldn’t listen.

They had dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night this time, and brought him into a testing chamber, then laid a deck of tarot cards out in front of him. A man in a military uniform had sat down across from the chair Doug was strapped into, and instructed him to read the cards. When Doug had stared blankly at him and rolled his eyes, the man held up a remote and a shock ran through the electrodes hooked up to Doug’s temples. He gasped and tried to explain that he didn’t know how, but the man simply shocked him again. Doug jolted his arms against the restraints that held him to the chair, and the military man raised an eyebrow. He stood up slowly, reached across the table, but stopped short of the edge. Rather than removing the restraints, he slowly turned over seven cards. Doug shrugged, the symbols on the cards didn’t mean anything to him. The man adjusted something on his remote, and the next shock that hit Doug was more powerful, enough that a scream that erupted out of his throat. The sudden surge and release of energy snapped something inside of him, and suddenly a series of images flashed behind his eyes.

* * *

_Somewhere a boat was lost at sea, and large, dark shapes swirled in the wild water beneath it. A baby let out its first cry, which was quickly whipped away by the high winds of the storm. Lightning crashed out of the sky and struck the roof of the ship’s cabin._

Moments later, in a field in Montana, a circle of clouds grew suddenly dark and agitated, and lightning struck down out of the center of the miniature storm. A heavy downpour of water streamed straight down, followed by a boat, the top of which was smoking slightly. 

The baby cried louder. The impact of the boat’s landing had scared it.

Hector and Marina Cardenas were driving and having the same argument that they had almost every day when they saw a huge shape fall out of the sky in front of them. The argument was forgotten for the moment as they stared open-mouthed at what appeared to be a boat, in the middle of the field. Marina slowly opened her door, and leaned out of the car.

“Marina, what are you doing, get back in the car!” Hector snapped nervously.

“No, listen. Don’t you hear it?” she was practically whispering, with a look of curiosity mixed with concern on her face. “I think there’s someone in that boat.”

“Who cares? We didn’t put them there. Please, Marina, I’m tired, let’s go home,” Hector pleaded, but his wife was already out of the car and walking slowly towards the boat. “Shit,” h murmured and turned the engine off. He jumped out of the car and quickly took off after her. The grass squelched wetly under their feet, the cuffs of Hector’s pants were weighed down by mud. But as they got closer, he heard it. Someone on the boat was crying, it sounded like a child. 

“Marina, I don’t like this,” Hector hissed. There was so much wrong with this. They were nowhere near the water, how could this boat have washed up in the middle of a field? It was resting at a slight angle, and water still poured off the sides and top, as if a wave had rushed passed over it and left it here. The cries from inside were getting louder and more insistent as they stopped in front of the prow of the boat. It was a clear night, and the moon shone down brightly enough that they could read the name of the ship, printed in neat letters on its side.

“The Infant Male, Pollock, Francis,” Marina whispered. She reached out a hand and touched the side of the ship. Hector half expected her hand to pass through it, like a ghost or a hallucination. She walked over to the ladder on the side, and set her hands on the rails to pull herself up. 

“Marina! What are you doing?!” 

“I’m going to go find the baby. We can’t just leave it here,” she replied calmly. She began to climb the ladder while Hector gaped at her, searching for some way to talk her back down.

“What are you going to do when you find it? What, are we just going to keep it?”

“If we can’t find any parents on the boat, then yes, maybe. I don’t know, Hector, it just feels wrong to leave a crying baby alone on a mysterious boat in a field at night.” 

It was admittedly difficult to argue with that logic, and he watched as she disappeared over the side of the boat. Cursing, he scrambled up the ladder after her. The deck of the ship was slippery and wet, and there was a hole in the center that was vaguely smoking. They stared at the gap together for a few moments, wondering what could have happened and whether it was connected to the reason the ship had ended up in the field. Shaking her head as if to wake up out of a dream, Marina grabbed her husband’s hand and pulled him after her towards the cabin door, which was slightly ajar. She pushed it farther open, and as they stepped inside the small room, they saw the lump of blankets the cries were emanating from. They peered down at the tiny figure, too small to be anything but a newborn. Marina picked the child up and held it against her chest, rocking back and forth until the wails subsided. 

“I don’t see anyone else here, do you?” she asked. It was true, there were no other signs of life on the ship. That didn’t make Hector feel any better though. 

“Yeah but where are the baby’s parents?”

“His name is Francis. And we’re going to be his parents now.”

“Marina…” But she was already leaving the cabin with the boy. Hector sighed and followed his wife back to the car. He drove her and his new son home, thinking the whole time about how to explain this to their own son.

* * *

Project Mot was breathing hard, drenched in sweat. The military man was smiling, and he leaned forward across the table. “Tell me, Project Mot, what did you see?” he asked as he gathered his cards back into a pile and began to shuffle them. Doug’s eyes barely registered what the man was doing, he was only half present. Scenes were still playing across his mind’s eye. 

“Bergsberg…” he gasped, with great effort. “Boat… Cardenas.”

“What, are you Gollum now?” the military man asked. But Doug was lost to his visions again and couldn’t answer. 

* * *

Two young boys played outside of a barn. They ran around, shrieking, as they tried to shoot at each other with toy guns. The taller, older boy had a plastic pistol, and wore a cowboy hat and a shiny sheriff badge pinned to his t-shirt. He waited against the wall of the barn until his younger brother made an entire lap, then pointed the toy gun at him and yelled for him to freeze. The younger boy aimed a bizarre looking toy gun at his brother and informed him that he would not be taken in alive. Though there didn’t seem to be any moving parts to his toy gun, he fired and a huge blast of air slammed his brother into the wall of the barn, knocking all the breath out of him for a moment. He coughed as his younger brother immediately ran to his side to make sure he was okay. 

“Jeez, Frankie, what was that? Where did you get that thing?” the older brother asked, rubbing his sore rib cage. 

“I dreamed I had it, and then it was on my nightstand when I woke up,” said the younger boy with a shrug. “I thought maybe it was a gift from Watki.” 

“Your snail? Frankie, she’s imaginary, she can’t make air guns appear out of nowhere.” He got up and shoved his own toy pistol into his back pocket. He started to walk away from the barn, back towards the house. The younger boy frowned and jogged after his brother.

“She’s real, Arnie. She talks to me. She tells me things in my dreams. She says I made her real when I was just a baby.”

“That’s enough, Frankie. I get it, you have a big imagination. But I mean, really, you need to know the difference between dreams and real life.” 

* * *

The boys were a few years older now, sitting on a bed together, looking at a large drawing that took up most of the wall opposite them. Angry, muffled voices came from the lower level of the house, still audible even over the cheesy fantasy cartoon that blared from the TV in the corner. A box of crayons was scattered on the floor in front of the mural, and the brothers were nodding at their work, satisfied with what they had come up with. 

“The moon is really cool, Arnie. I like how you made it smile.”

“Thanks, I like the train in the sky, that’s a cool idea too.”

“Yeah, we’ll trap that Mage in there when we catch him and defeat his evil plans! And we’ll celebrate with all the Befookie Nepoo in the marshmallow forests until we need to go back to our castle, and-” A sudden crashing noise, like something glass shattering on the floor, interrupted Francis’s excited ramblings. He looked nervously to Arnold for reassurance, but his older brother was frowning at the door. 

“I’m gonna go check and make sure everything’s okay down there, you hang out up here and keep working on Wendimoor, got it Frankie?” He got up off the bed and went to the door. The yelling was grew louder as he opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway, but he closed it quickly behind him, leaving his younger brother alone with the TV and crayons. Francis frowned, but then turned back to his fantasy land, and resumed drawing with a determined look on his young face. He would make a perfect world for himself and his brother to escape to. 

* * *

Arnold and Francis were sitting in the middle of a large, colorful room with balloons filling the ceiling. They were taking turns using the air gun to blast the balloons around, trying to do it in such a way that the balloons wouldn’t pop. After a few minutes of this, Arnold stood up and stretched his arms up over his head. He looked to be in his early teenage years by now, and was visibly bored. He walked towards the kitchen while Francis continued to blast his balloons around, unconcerned with his brother’s boredom. Arnold opened the back door, and stepped away quickly, looking suddenly scared. 

“Frankie, why does it look like there’s nothing outside of the house? It’s all...static!” Francis stood up, placed the gun on the carpet, and walked over to join his brother by the back door. He reached his hand out and put it into the static, then pulled it back in.

“It’s not dangerous, see? Come on,” he said and grabbed onto Arnold’s hand, and stepped into the static before Arnold could protest. They emerged in their own back yard, just outside of the back door that led to their actual kitchen. Arnold looked down at himself, but there was nothing amiss. The static was safe to pass through after all. He wasn’t sure why he had been so worried now. Arnold would never do anything to try and hurt him, not deliberately. He smiled at his little brother, and ruffled his hair fondly. 

“Don’t tell mom and dad about the slide to the fun house, okay buddy? They’d just worry.” Arnold smiled as Francis nodded enthusiastically. It would be their secret, they could go to the fun house when their parents started arguing about selling the land again. 

* * *

The giant purple monster knocked a hole through the barn wall as Arnold ran back for the house. Hector saw his eldest child running for the back door, and then the thing that was chasing after him, and he raced to get his shotgun, and called for his wife to go and wake up Francis. The boy was having a nightmare, and the monster had come to get him in real life. This child they had rescued from the boat all those years ago was cursed, Hector had come to believe that over the years of having the kid in his house. Arnold slammed the door shut behind him, and Hector threw the bolt to lock it. He snapped at Arnold to go get somewhere safe, and opened up the window so he could try to get a shot at the purple monster that was slowly moving towards his house. He could hear Marina trying to tell Francis to get rid of it, but it still got closer and closer. Hector cocked his gun and took aim, but just as he pulled the trigger, the monster disappeared. He let out a long, deep breath that he hadn’t realized he was holding. This kid was gonna be the death of him, he just knew it. 

* * *

Doug was breathing hard, he wasn’t sure how long he had been sitting tied to this chair, how long the visions had been swimming in front of him. His fingers were twitching, aching to write down what he had seen. His wild eyes settled on the man, still seated across the table from him. 

“So, the child is in Bergsberg, huh?” The man stood up, and walked to a door. It opened and on the other side, Doug could see more uniformed men standing there, almost like they were waiting for orders. The man that had tried to get Doug to read the tarot cards simply said “Send someone out there to establish contact with the parents.” Then he was gone, and the door closed behind him. Hands came from behind Doug and undid his restraints, and he rubbed at his wrists where angry red marks now ringed them. He turned and saw the people who had been behind him in the room the whole time were not in military uniforms, but white lab coats. One held a clipboard and was still scratching notes while the other helped Doug get up. 

“Please,” he asked the one who had undone his ties, “can I please have some paper and a pen? I need to record what I saw in here. I know you want a record, I’m begging you, please just let me write it myself.” The scientists said nothing, just grabbed one of his arms and started to lead him back to his chamber. They let him go when they reached the door, but one glanced around quickly, nervously, then ripped his pages of notes off his pad of paper, drew a pen from his top pocket, and handed both to the boy. Doug looked at the scientist’s face for the first time since he had been woken up, and saw that she was a woman. She pressed the pad of paper and pen more forcefully into his hands, and turned to leave, closing his door behind her. 

* * *

_July 23rd, 1967._

Several months went by, the same as those that had come before them, and Project Mot continued to fail miserably at the tests that they set him to. He guessed it had been about a year and a half since he had been taken. He had seen nothing of the outside world in all that time. He hadn’t had any visions since he had seen the childhood of the boy from the boat flash before him. He was being led through the hallway to who knew what sort of test, when something caught his attention. A door with a swirling, circular symbol painted on it. It was a very different symbol to the one painted on Project Mot’s door, but he knew instinctively what it meant. They had found someone else, someone like him. He asked the large man in the uniform that was escorting him who was behind this new door. The man remained silent, and kept dragging Mot away towards some horrible test. Doug kept asking for the next several weeks, until finally the man who had once told him to read tarot cards showed up at his chamber door one night. He led them down the hallway to the door with the circular symbol on it, and punched something into the keypad next to it. They stepped inside, and Doug gazed down at the small figure lying in the bed in the center of the room. Tubes and wires were attached to him in too many places to count. His eyes were closed but they moved restlessly behind his eyelids. The military man quietly explained that the boy had been through a trauma, and had gone into a coma when they tried to take him from his home. They had hooked him up to life support systems, and were continuously scanning his brain. 

Doug moved closer to the boy, and looked sadly down at his face. The boy was still so young, he couldn’t have been much older than ten. Doug felt a twisting pain in his stomach as he realized that this boy was here, was in a coma, because of Doug’s visions. It was his fault that this child was stuck here now. Tears started to fall from his eyes, and splashed on the soft sheet that covered the boy in his bed. A hand touched his shoulder, and Doug looked around sharply. The military man withdrew his hand when he saw the look on Doug’s face. He simply told him that it was time to go back to his own chamber. Doug reached out and gently cupped the younger boy’s face, and he leaned forward and pressed a soft kiss of apology to the child’s forehead, then stood up and walked silently back to his chamber with the large uniformed man. When they reached Doug’s door, the man punched in his key combination, and the doors swung open. Doug hesitated for a moment before he entered. 

“Thank you for letting me see him.” 

“Please do not worry yourself over Project Moloch. He will receive better care here than he could hope to find anywhere else.” The door closed behind Doug, and he sank to the floor and cried to himself long into the night.


	3. Project Dagon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: out of body experiences, implied violence, mentions of violence

_October 28th, 1967._

Doug was losing track of time in this place. He thought it must have been several months since they had brought in the other kid, Project Moloch. He still hadn’t woken up from his coma. Whenever Doug asked the scientists who tested him about the other kid, they gave him the most frustrating non-answers. Doug was starting to think that he might not ever wake up. He felt so bad for the little boy. He would never have wound up in this state if Doug hadn’t seen him in those weird visions.

They tried to force him to have more visions, but as many times as he repeated that he couldn’t control it, they didn’t seem to care. After the ones that had been brought on through electric shocks, they had run too many tests for him to count, trying different voltages, and frequencies of shocks, using different types of currents, none of it made any difference. He didn’t see anything. They finally gave up on the electrocutions when his heart stopped for a few minutes after one particularly difficult test. The scientists tried new methods to trigger his visions, seeming to work from the hypothesis that physical pain or danger was the catalyst. Nothing that they tried made any difference, he couldn’t see anything except for what was right in front of him. Not even breaking his arm was enough to force him to have visions, he simply could not control when they would come to him.

There was one benefit to having his arm broken though. He was given a break from testing for a few weeks, and was finally able to rest, and to think. He looked over the few pages he had been able to write from what he remembered of his visions. Some details had slipped away from him, but he was pretty sure he had gotten everything important down in the little notepad the scientist had slipped him. He had even tried to draw out a little bit of what he had seen, the boat crashing out of the sky, the gun that shot air, the static outside of the door of the house. Doug had no idea what any of it was supposed to mean, but he felt terrible for the child who now resided down the hall from him. Francis, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, who was now in a coma, and Doug could not escape the thought that it was all his fault. He had seen the boy, and it he had told these people about him.

Doug was lying awake one night, consumed with guilt, when he felt something strange begin to happen. It was not the same as the other times he had had visions, it felt more like something or someone was softly touching the back of his mind. He sat up and looked wildly around the room, but he was just as alone as he had been for the past two weeks. Still he couldn’t shake the feeling. He was about to get up out of bed and turn on the lights, when a voice spoke inside his head. 

“Please don’t cry, Doug. It’s not your fault Francis is here with you.”

Now Doug was truly afraid. He could still see everything in the room around him, at least as much as he could ever see in the dark. He couldn’t see anything else, this wasn’t a vision. 

“You can hear me inside your mind.” said the voice. “I felt your pain and astral projected into your...room? I don’t wanna call it a cell, but I mean we both know it’s not really like your room.”

“You, wait, what? Who are you?” Doug whispered, partly because he didn’t want to attract the attention of any of the scientists or guards, but partly too because he hadn’t had anyone to talk to for two weeks, and his voice was hoarse from disuse. “What do you mean you felt my pain?”

“It might take a little while to explain everything. Please sit down and I’ll do my best.” Doug sat back on his bed, and leaned against the wall. He drew his legs close, unsure of whether he needed to leave room for a disembodied voice to sit on the other side of his bed, but figuring it was the polite thing to do. 

“Hang on, this part is sorta tricky to do, I need to concentrate.” As the voice in Doug’s mind said this, a ghostly figure began to appear on the end of his bed. It looked sort of like a hologram of boy, a few years younger than Doug, with dark hair and thick glasses. He wasn’t solid, Doug could see through him if he squinted and focused on the shape of the door behind him. “Ok, that’s probably a little easier to deal with than just my voice. Hi, nice to meet you. I’m Orion.” The ghostly boy moved as if he was going to hold out his hand to shake Doug’s, but just as quickly as he had started he seemed to realize that there would be no point in them shaking hands, and reached up to touch the back of his head instead. 

“Um, hi. You seem to already know my name is Doug. How exactly did you know my name? And how are you here right now? Why can I see through you?” It was a struggle not to ask all of the thousands of questions that were racing through his mind all at once. Sure he had seen and experienced some strange things in the past year, but this was somehow still surprising and strange. 

“We’ll start with how I’m here right now, that’s an easier answer. I was on the astral plane, I like to hang out there when things at home or at school get bad. But I didn’t go back to my body yet, it’s still in my room where I left it. Instead I created sort of a hologram of myself, like a puppet made of just enough light that you can see me. I don’t think I’ll show up on their security cameras, which I assume you already knew about. So, they might think you went a little bit crazy and started talking to yourself, but honestly who wouldn’t go crazy in this place.” 

“So, you’re not really here. I’m just seeing things again, but in a different way this time.” 

“Exactly!” The boy, Orion, looked excited that Doug had understood him, but his grin slipped from his face as he saw how upset this had made Doug. “No, I didn’t mean it like that, you’re not seeing things, I’m real, it’s just I’m in a different physical location, I, um,” he was babbling, trying to correct his misstep. If a ghost or a projection or whatever he was could sweat, Doug thought he probably would have been right about now. 

“So why am I seeing you? Why are you here, making me look and feel even crazier than I already did?” It came out a little more sharply than he had intended, but Doug was in no mood to be polite to his hallucinations. 

“Ok, so that part is the kinda complicated part. The short answer is that I’m like you, I have powers. You can see things, things that have happened far away, things that haven’t happened yet. You saw the life of Francis Pollock, or parts of it at least. I saw you see these things.” He paused here, and looked down at his hands. Doug looked confused, but before he could ask, Orion went on. “I can see things too. Only, they don’t come to me like they do for you. I have to go to whatever it is I want to see. I can take my mind out of my body, to something called the astral realm. I can see anything I want to there, but I have to travel to see it. I can also make things while I’m there, and send them into the world. One time I made an asteroid! I shot it at the field near my house, but it all burned up before it hit the ground. Huge waste of time.” 

Orion shook his head as if to clear it of thoughts of his failed asteroid strike before he continued. “So, I was on the astral plane one day about a year ago and I felt something that I had never felt before. It was like there was someone else there with me, touching some part of my mind. I felt this connection, and it went out in a bunch of directions. Then I saw all these glowing points on the physical plane, but one was brighter than all the others. So I let my mind get pulled towards that point, and I sort of zoomed backed towards the ground. Usually when I come back from astral projection I can just close my eyes and when I open them I’ll be back in my body, but this time I didn’t go to my own body. When I stopped I was floating above a street I had never seen before, and a bunch of big military looking people were loading someone with glowing eyes into a van. I felt the same connection as before but even stronger, and I knew you had called out to me. Not just me though. You called a lot of people. You sent out a distress signal all across the world. I’ve been checking in on you as often as I can since then.”

Doug had to sit silently for a minute to absorb all this. He thought back to that night, that felt like it had happened a lifetime ago. He remembered the bizarre slideshow of faces that had flashed before him, and the people he had seen fleeing from something. He fought to recognize Orion as one of the faces he had seen, but it was too difficult. He wished he had been able to record those visions immediately, maybe he would have been able to get some key characteristics down before they slipped away from him. 

“Okay, so I called you, or sent a distress flare or something. But how do you even know how to do this?” Doug gestured at the other boy’s insubstantial form. “How did you learn about your powers?” Orion sat silently for a minute, like he was trying to figure out how to explain something complicated. 

“I want to try something, but I’m not sure it will work,” he said finally. “I’m going to try to show you a vision, like you’ve had before. I’m going to touch you, and concentrate on my memories, and hopefully you’ll see them too. Will you try it with me?” Orion stretched his ghostly hand out to Doug, palm up, and looked him in the eye. Doug hesitated for a moment, but he reached his unbroken arm out and held the other boy’s hand. It felt more solid than he had expected, but it still did not feel like a hand, exactly. It tingled against Doug’s skin, like it was buzzing with electricity. He felt the same tingle in his mind, like a hum that grew louder and more insistent with each second. Orion closed his eyes, his brow furrowed in deep concentration, and Doug felt compelled to close his as well. He sat there in the dark, with his eyes closed, feeling silly and childish for a minute. Then suddenly colors began to swirl around in the darkness of his eyelids, and they began to form pictures. 

* * * 

In a small bedroom with star maps on the walls and model rockets on the shelves and the desk, a telescope in front of the window, and a model of the solar system dangling down from the ceiling, a young boy, not much older than 8 or 9 years old, lays in the bed staring up at the planets. The sun is just starting to come up outside his window, the birds are singing their cheerful tunes from nearby trees, and there are sounds of other people moving around in other parts of the house. The boy does not look pleased by any of this, in fact he is scowling deeply. A sudden knock at the door is accompanied by a woman’s voice, saying “Come on, it’s time to get up. You don’t want to be late for school.” He drags himself reluctantly from the bed where he had been lying, already fully dressed, and begins to grab things from the desk and cram them into his backpack, clearly going as slowly as he can to buy more time. After a few minutes the knocking comes again. “Orion! Let’s go! You’re going to make your dad late!” 

He shuffles down the stairs, where a man in a suit and tie is finishing his coffee in the kitchen, briefcase already in hand, looking at the clock on the wall. He puts his mug in the sink and heads to the door, not saying anything to his son, not even checking to make sure his son is following him. Orion shuffles after him, and they get in a car and drive off, still in silence. Orion gazes out the window petulantly as they drive, watching the sky grow lighter as the sun came up. His father does not make conversation, he does not turn on the radio, he just drives in silence until they reach the school. As he pulls up in front of the building, he says only “See you later, son,” before driving off. Orion walks through the front doors, head down, to begin another day of monotony and boredom. 

In class he draws stars and constellations in his notebook and stares out the window, instead of listening to the boring old science teacher, who is droning on about the discovery of gravity or some other thing that Orion had no interest in. He just wanted to fly out the window and all the way to outer space. Already today the other boys in his class had taken his backpack and dumped everything out in the hall, and hit him in the stomach so hard he had doubled up in pain. As he walked in the halls he could hear people on all sides whispering about what a space case he was, snickering at his glasses or the large stack of books he was carrying. It was the same every day, and he was staring out of the window in an attempt to drown out his feelings, as much as the whispered taunts from a few desks over. It wasn’t dark yet by any means, but he could see the moon already, hanging incongruously in the early afternoon sky. He imagined zooming up and away towards the moon, where he could finally be alone and stare at the stars all day and all night. He closed his eyes for a minute, trying to focus all his mind on his daydreams. 

Things went quiet and Orion smiled to himself. It was a small victory but he would savor it nonetheless. He open his eyes, and did a double take. He couldn’t see his science teacher, or any of his classmates. He looked down and saw that he appeared to be standing just slightly above the surface of the moon. He looked out and could see the Earth from a distance, it would have been a breathtaking sight if he had any breath to take away, but he found that he did not actually seem to need to breathe here. He held his hands up to his face, but he could see right through them. It was like he was a ghost. He felt his heart beating faster and faster and suddenly he flew back down towards the planet at dizzying speeds. Down through the clouds, he could recognize his school, he passed through the window and suddenly he was blinking his eyes and breathing hard. Confusion and terror raced each other around in his brain, he was worried that he had just died for a minute. The bell rang, and he nearly jumped a foot in the air. 

* * * 

When Orion’s dad picked him up from school, the drive home was as silent as ever, but this silence felt different. Orion wasn’t silent because he was exhausted and unhappy. He hadn’t been able to pay attention to his bullies after what had happened in science. He spent the day in a haze, and it persisted all the way home. He was staring up at the moon, trying to decide if he had been dreaming or not. He went directly to his room when they got home, and didn’t come downstairs, even for dinner. As it grew dark outside his window, he watched the stars poking out one by one. He kept still, and silent, and tried to empty his mind, to quiet the roaring tide of questions before it could force him under and drown him. As the last remnants of the sun faded beyond the horizon, he closed his eyes and pictured the moon, concentrating all his effort on conjuring up the image of the place he had been earlier. 

He opened his eyes slowly, and turned around in a circle. An enormous smile spread across his face as he realized it had worked. He had come back, he was on the moon. He looked down on the Earth, and let himself get lost in its majesty for a while. He turned around and stared out into the void of space for even longer, at all the stars and galaxies and the vast empty space between them. He bent down to get a moon rock to bring home, but his fingers weren’t solid and couldn’t grip the rock. He shrugged, supposing it made sense. He wasn’t really here, somehow. He walked around for a while and admired the landscape, completely different from anything he was used to on Earth. He slid down the lip of a crater, presumably left by an asteroid impact. He wondered he’d be able to recognize it again with his telescope. He left before too long, not wanting to accidentally stay the whole night.

* * * 

After several weeks of difficult research, Orion was starting to get the hang of his new powers. He could picture himself anywhere he wanted, and would find himself there if he could concentrate hard enough. He practised often at school, leaving his classroom to listen to the lessons the older kids got. Suddenly he didn’t hate going to school every day, as this came with the added bonus of not having to listen to his classmates tease him. He could even leave the school entirely, and roam around the town, or go explore the woods. He could do anything he wanted, really. 

He had found a book in the library called ‘The Art and Practice of Astral Projection,’ and though the librarian had given him a skeptical face when he checked it out, she did not tell him to put it back and find something more suitable for children like some of his teachers often had. The book had given him great insights into his newfound abilities, and he stayed up late reading it and practicing. He learned to focus his mind on moving objects while he was outside his body, and spent a night flipping the pages of the book using only his mind. He went to the moon and threw rocks around. He left his body in class to hurl things at the heads of his bullies. He spent classes flipping through books in the library, returning to his body only when absolutely necessary.

* * * 

The scene changed, and Orion was a few years older now. He was floating in space, not on the moon this time but several miles away from it. He floated cross-legged, his brows furrowed as he stared down at his hands. Between his palms dust was swirling, drawn in from the space around him. As he pulled the matter together, a rock formed, and grew steadily bigger, floating in front of him. Soon it was larger than he was, and Orion could feel the phantom sensation of sweat beading his forehead. When it was so large that it dwarfed him, he took a long, slow breath, or at least he thought of taking a long, slow breath. Then he pictured an invisible force throwing the asteroid as hard as possible off into the void. The huge chunk of what had been dust minutes before hurtled away, and he urged it to pick up speed. Then he leaned back and looked at the constellation that was his namesake, and drew the figure of the hunter using the flaming tail of his comet, and laughed loudly to the space around him.

* * * 

He opened his eyes as his mind slammed forcibly back into his body. Someone had just kicked him sharply in the shin, and the pain had dragged him away from the book he had been reading in the library. The boy in front of him was taller than him, maybe a year or two older, and he was yelling something incomprehensible to Orion in the disoriented and confused state he was currently in. He ripped the glasses off Orion’s face, threw them at the ground and stamped on them, then stormed off. The bell rang to signal it was time to go to lunch, but Orion was too stunned to move, he just lay on the floor and stared at the blurry outline of his now broken glasses. He could feel the anger boiling up in him, and fought to keep tears from leaking out of his eyes. When he got outside for recess, he sat perfectly still under his favorite tree, far enough away from the playground that hardly anyone came over to bother him. He willed his mind to go blank, but retained the angry fire he felt towards the boy who had broken his glasses. He left his body and floated his mind in empty space. He sat cross-legged and made an asteroid, just like the one he had used to play connect the dots with constellations, but he did not aim it at the stars this time. He pictured the school yard in his mind and imagined throwing the asteroid with pinpoint precision at the playground. 

He watched as his comet flew down to Earth, and quickly returned to his body. He got up and ran as far away from the playground as he could, then turned around and looked up at the sky. He could see the comet, burning brightly as it came screaming through the atmosphere. Orion saw his classmates looking up and heard screams. He thought the shape should be getting bigger as it came closer, but it seemed to stay the same size, then to grow smaller even. He realized too late that it was burning up entering the atmosphere, and all that would land would be some pebbles. He scowled and began to walk back towards the school. As he passed by his tree, a rock roughly the size of his fist dropped down through the branches and landed at his feet. He leaned down and grabbed it and stuffed it in his backpack, and continued to trudge back towards the school. 

* * * 

The tingling sensation in Doug’s hand faded, and he opened his eyes to see the translucent figure of Orion sitting at the edge of his bed, his eyes cast down at his feet. Doug wanted to squeeze the boy’s shoulder, but knew his hand would just pass through. He cleared his throat, and looked around the room for something else to focus on, to give the other boy some space. Doug got up and pulled the notebook and pen out from under the corner of his mattress, then sat back down and began to write some of what Orion had shown him. He made bullet points of the important details, then drew a sketch of an asteroid descending on a playground. After a few minutes, he looked up and saw Orion watching him. “I just wanted to make sure I remember what I saw,” he explained. 

The other boy nodded. “That’s a smart thing to do. Keep a record of your powers and how they work, too. You’ll find the patterns in when your visions show up, and once you understand that, you might be able to control the visions.” 

“I don’t think it works like that for me,” Doug replied slowly. “It happens when it needs to happen, not when I expect it to.” 

”Keep a record anyway,” said Orion. “It will help you keep your mind focused. You will need to stay alert in this place, I saw how well guarded it is when I was coming in.” 

“Where am I? Where is this place? I was unconscious for most of the drive here when they took me.”

“It’s a desert somewhere, but I’m not sure where exactly. Listen, I need to leave because the longer you talk to me, the weirder their footage is going to be.” 

“Where are you though? I mean, your body, where is your body? Can you come and get me out of here? And that Cardenas boy, we’ll need to get him too. How long would it take you to get here?” Doug was filled with hope for the first time in nearly a year. If this boy had found him in his mind he could come back physically and Doug could break out, go home. He would see his friends and parents again, he could go back to how things were, just be normal again.

“I’m from Canada. I’m hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away from this place. I’m sorry, Doug, it would take me months to get here on my own. And I can’t just run away from home to come and rescue you, as much as I want to.” Orion looked heartbroken, he couldn’t meet Doug’s eyes. 

“But, you have to help me! I can’t stay here, this place is crazy! Please, get me out of here, please!” All the hope that Doug had just felt drained out of him just as quickly as it had come, and he felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. 

“I can’t come and get you, but I will look for someone who can. I felt the connection, it went to more people than just you. You felt it too, right?” 

Doug nodded, he knew there were many more people who were like him and this boy, and little Francis.

Orion nodded too, and now he looked into Doug’s eyes. “I’ll look for them, and I’ll try and send them to get you. I will help you, but I need to leave you now. You are not alone, Doug. We are everywhere, and we are connected. We will help you.” 

The boy faded from Doug’s sight. He was alone again. He looked fleetingly at the security cameras in his room, and then went back to his notebook. He wrote in great detail about what Orion had showed him, how he had felt physically and emotionally during it. He drew the comet connect the dots, the book pages flipping of their own accord. He drew a boy forming an asteroid between his hands, dust swirling in from the empty space around him. He looked back up at the camera, and set the notebook down on the floor next to his bed. They had seen him writing in it, there was no point hiding it beneath the mattress. He would not let these people intimidate him and force him to live in fear. He had lived in fear for almost an entire year, and he was fed up with it. 

* * * 

_October 31st, 1967._

A doctor had come in and looked at Doug’s arm, and decided he could resume testing, but to much less extreme degree than what they had been putting him through before. There would be no electrical shocks, no physical duress, the doctor explained to the large military man who had sat in with them for the examination. The doctor suggested they run mental assessments instead, that did not involve physical exertion on Doug’s part. As they left the exam room to take Doug off to the first of these new tests, he saw a door with a symbol. It looked similar to the one on his door, and Doug stopped dead in his tracks as soon as he saw it. 

“Who’s in there?” he demanded of the military man. The man looked at the door, then continued moving, expecting Doug to continue as well. 

“No one you need to be concerned about,” he replied. Then he looked back and saw that Doug had not continued walking with him. He was still standing still in front of the door, staring at the symbol. 

“Who is it?” he asked slowly. He had a sinking feeling in his gut, but he needed to know.

“We call him Project Dagon,” said the military man. “I believe the two of you met, in some capacity, when he astral projected into this facility to talk to you. You know very well that your quarters are under surveillance, and we saw him visit you. He told us everything we needed to know to find him and bring him in for examination. I am telling you this because I know you will not stop asking unless I do, but that is all you need to know about him. You will not be permitted to see him. He is not permitted to leave that room. I will not answer any further questions on the subject. Now, continue walking or I will have the guards carry you to your quarters.” 

Doug stared after the military man as he turned and resumed walking down the hall. Doug followed, but looked back at the door before they turned the corner. Even though Orion was now stuck here too, Doug couldn’t help but be somewhat excited. If they could see each other, and talk to each other, maybe they could get out of here. Maybe Orion had found the others like them, or still could. Even if his body wasn’t allowed to leave his room, his mind still could. He could find people to come and help them. Doug felt that surge of hope again, like a match being lit deep inside of him. He knew all he had to do was to keep that flame burning, and he could make it out of this place.


	4. Project Bel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: implied kidnapping

_April 14, 1968._

Doug and Orion were learning that life in a top-secret government facility is much more bearable if you were stuck there with a friend. There were measures in place to keep the two boys from seeing each other, but the scientists didn’t seem to have any idea how Orion’s powers worked, and consequently could not stop him from astral projecting into Doug’s room after they were both done with testing for the day. They were conscious of the fact that there was someone watching them all the time, but they took the risk anyway. It was what kept them sane through the barrage of physical and mental examinations in the months after Orion was brought in. Doug knew it was perhaps wrong to feel this way, but he was secretly glad Orion was here with him. He had missed having someone close to his own age to talk to, someone to feel bad for him in his horrible situation, someone to care for him and to care for. He felt a certain protectiveness for this younger boy who was here, to an extent, because of Doug. 

Yet, after a few months, it became clear to Doug that the environment was starting to wear the boy down. He smiled less, joked less, and was starting to visit less and less in his ghostly astral form. When he did visit, he seemed distracted and had trouble keeping up the conversation. Doug worried that his new friend was beginning to lose his mind. He wondered what the scientists were doing to Orion, feared that the head supervisor, the large and intimidating military man, had been to see the boy and had said something to frighten him away from Doug. It had been two weeks since Orion’s ghostly, opalescent form had appeared at the foot of Doug’s bed. Doug was worried that he himself would lose his mind, between fearing for the safety of his friend and the toll of the tests, which he was back to facing alone. 

He laid awake in his bed one night, as he did most nights, and hoped to hear Orion’s voice coming from the end of his bed. Just as Doug’s eyes began to drift closed, he did hear a voice. It was an unfamiliar voice though, definitely not Orion. This was a girl’s voice. She was laughing, and suddenly Doug’s eyes were dazzled with light, sparkling and golden. He could not be certain whether he had closed his eyes and was dreaming the light, or if he was truly seeing it. 

* * * 

_A young girl with auburn hair and amber colored eyes, who could not have been any older that five or six, was laying on the ground in a field of flowers, and rays of sunshine seemed to emit out from her. The light was changing color in waves, and the girl was laughing ecstatically. She waggled her fingers in the air above her, and the light shot out like the burst of fireworks, and the girl laughed even louder. Doug reached a hand up to his face, brushing his fingers just under his eye, remembering the way his eyes had given off rainbow light when he had first seen all of the others like him. Before he could think any more about it though, the scene around him changed._

* * * 

_The girl looked a few years older, maybe seven, her long hair tied up in a ponytail, clad in a black t-shirt and denim overalls. She was standing deep in the forest, where light had trouble reaching down through the thick canopy of leaves. The girl seemed to be moving the few dappled rays of light that did reach the ground, pushing them this way and that, until they were all in one concentrated space. The light did not lose its dappled quality even as she pushed it and pulled it, her fingers pinching and plucking at it as though it were clay that she was sculpting. After a few moments she stepped back and shook out her hands, seeming to be satisfied with her work. The image of a fawn, flickering in and out of being as the light had flickered through the trees, stood before her, taking its first steps on uncertain and insubstantial legs. She smiled and made a motion with her fingers as if she were miming walking to the fawn. It started to trot around her in a circle, and the girl beamed. Doug felt himself smile as well, he could not help it. As was too often the case though, the beauty around him slipped away far too quickly, and the scene melted around him and changed again._

* * * 

_She was sitting in the library and leafing through a book. The light coming through the high windows reflected off the dust that floated in the still air of the room. She ran her finger over the page, as if to underline a significant passage. Then she looked up and did her strange plucking motion in the air in front of her, like she was picking out just a small section of the large beam of sunlight streaming down on the library. She took out a glass water bottle, and set it on the desk, then closed her eyes in concentration. The beam of light narrowed and grew brighter, and the water started to steam and bubble as the light warmed it up. She opened her eyes and smiled at the bubbling water bottle in front of her, and wiped her hand in front of her to scatter the light beam. She capped the water bottle and put it away quickly, glancing around to make sure no one had seen her, then got up and made for the exit._

* * * 

_She was alone in what was unmistakably a school bathroom, gazing at herself in the mirror. She looked to be about ten years old at this point. As she stood in front of the mirror, she raised both hands and wrinkled her brow, then waved her hands around her. She disappeared, just vanished completely. It was impossible to say where she was standing, despite the fact that she had been there mere seconds before. You hear her though, as she began to clap excitedly. Her smile appeared in the air, and the smile laughed quietly. Then the rest of her re-appeared, just as quickly as she had vanished, waving her hands to scatter the light back to its natural state. She picked her backpack up off the floor next to her, and walked out of the bathroom as a bell rang overhead._

* * * 

As the scene dissolved, Doug was left in his bed, staring up at the blank ceiling. He wondered why he had been shown these scenes of this girl in particular. Why was he seeing her? And why now? Did it mean she was going to try and come to help them out of here, like Orion had tried to do? He didn’t know how long ago the visions he had seen had taken place. How old was she now? If she was still barely older than ten, how could she possibly stand a chance against an entire secret government operation on her own? He knew he had to talk to Orion, and tell him about what he had just seen, but since he was expressly forbidden from seeing the younger boy, and couldn’t project his mind into Orion’s room like the other boy could, he’d have to settle for recording his vision in meticulous detail so as not to forget anything by the time his friend was ready to talk. 

As he was replacing his notebook and pen, a bright, blood red light strobed outside the window on his door. He rushed to press his face against the glass to see what was happening, but the light was so bright he couldn’t make out anything more than several dark shadowy figures struggling down the hallway. It looked like there were two people holding a smaller third person between them. A child? The kid was thrashing about wildly, and sending off pulses of red light. Doug knew instantly that it was the same girl he had just seen in his visions, she was here. ‘Well, that answers a few questions, at least,’ he thought, but they were replaced by a new set of much more serious questions. How had they found her? He knew it couldn’t have been through him, he only saw her minutes before she was brought in. 

A terrible thought struck him then. Perhaps Orion had somehow been forced to find her. Had his friend been avoiding him because he felt guilty for bringing another child into this place? Doug shook his head in frustration, they could talk about it later. He understood what Orion was going through, but he had to focus now on making contact with their new friend. 

* * * 

The next morning when Doug was rudely awakened by the alarm, he was greeted at his door by two armed guards and the stern faced military man. Doug frowned and narrowed his eyes at them. 

“Good morning, Project Mot. You may have noticed some bright flashing lights last night. These lights were cast by a new project we have taken in. You will have no contact with Project Bel. This is as much information as you will receive about Project Bel. You will continue testing as usual. If you have any questions, that is unfortunate because you will be given no further information on Project Bel.” The military man turned on his heel to leave, and the guards closed in to block Doug from leaving his room. 

“How old is she?” Doug asked. The man stopped in his tracks, as if taken aback by the question. He turned back around and raised an eyebrow at Doug. 

“Why do you want to know that?” he asked. 

Doug shrugged, and said “I’m worried about her. This place must be terrifying for a child. She looked so small.” 

The military man stared at Doug for a long moment, like he was considering a move in chess. Finally he replied “She’s 12. Guards,” he said, and the two armed guards each grabbed one of Doug’s arms, and began to march him down the hall to a testing chamber. Doug fought the urge to crane his neck around to watch the supervisor leave. It didn’t matter where he was going, Doug wouldn’t be able to follow. He would enjoy his small victory over the supervisor. He had gotten more information out of him than the man had been originally willing to give. 

* * * 

That night, Doug was so exhausted from his testing that he could hardly move. He had laid down in his bed after changing into a clean shirt and he found he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, get back up. As he was laying in the darkness, willing his mind to let him slip into sleep, he felt a familiar tingle at the back of his mind, and heard a voice he had been longing to hear for weeks now. He struggled to sit up, and at the end of his bed he saw the spectral image of Orion. 

“Hey,” Orion said sheepishly. “Sorry it’s been so long. That’s on me, completely. I didn’t know how to tell you but-”

“It’s ok, I know,” Doug cut him off. “I saw them bring that little girl in, she made sure of it. I figured they must have made you see her somehow. Believe me, I understand what you’re going through. You don’t need to apologize.” 

Orion looked down at his hands for a minute and swallowed hard. “Thank you,” he finally said. “I just feel so bad for bringing her here.”

“It’s okay, we’ll get her out of here. We’re all going to get out of here, if we can work together. Can you see where she’s being kept in here?”

“I saw them take her down the hall from me, I think they’re keeping her in a separate wing of the building from us. I’ll try to get myself into her room though. I should apologize to her.” 

“Tell her she’s not alone in here and we’ll be looking out for her. And, before you go,” Doug looked his friend right in the eye. “There are a lot of other people like us out there, and these people want to bring us all in. They’ll do it in whatever way they can, and you shouldn’t feel bad if they manipulated information out of you, okay?”

Orion smiled a wobbly smile and nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Doug. We can get through this together. I’m gonna go and talk to her. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.” And with that, his ghostly form dissipated and Doug was alone again. He settled back down into his bed, and hoped as he fell asleep that the little girl was holding up as well as she could. As his eyes closed, he heard Orion’s voice whisper in the back of his mind. His friend said “Her name is Ilona Lux. She’s okay, they didn’t hurt her She says she’ll try to talk to you soon.” 

Doug sat up and quickly found a pen, then went to his notebook, and scrawled the name **ILONA LUX** over the page describing his vision of her. He replaced his stash and went back to bed, and slept more soundly than he had in weeks.


	5. Project Abaddon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: mentions of medical equipment (no detailed descriptions), false hope?

_February 4, 1969._

For the past- how many months had it even been? Time seemed to move in mysterious and inconsistent ways in this place, but Doug was fairly certain it had been at least five months since his last visions. Since the girl he had seen had turned up, a bright glowing ball of violent red light. At every opportunity he found, Doug asked for information about her. He wanted to be able to meet her, to talk to her and reassure her that she wasn’t alone in this place, that he would get her out of here. But the guards and scientists had persistently refused to talk about her, and would not let him anywhere near her, or any of the other kids who were trapped here. It was all so stupid, keeping them apart like this. Doug knew, deep in the pit of his stomach, that it would be nearly impossible for them to break out of this place. It was heavily guarded, alarmed, and he couldn’t be sure but Doug thought they might be underground. There were a lot of guns between them and the door, and Francis couldn’t even move. He didn’t like to dwell on it, but after a long day of mental and physical examinations, his mind often strayed to these dismal thoughts. 

Orion came to visit him as regularly as he could manage, but talking to a ghost can only accomplish so much. Doug couldn’t astral project himself into anyone else’s rooms and could only pass messages to Ilona second hand. He couldn’t see any of the facility besides his room and the series of identical hallways and test chambers that he was dragged to every day. At least Orion could explore their prison. But as the months had gone by, what he reported back to Doug hadn’t been exactly encouraging. Orion was trying to map out the floor of the facility that housed the kids, and had found that it was distressingly large. The rooms Doug and Francis were being kept relatively close to each other in the eastern wing of the building. Between Doug’ and Ilona’s chambers were four long stretches of hallway in his wing, then a large metal dividing wall, several feet thick, which only had two doors, one that let you pass into the west wing and one that let you pass out of it again. There were multiple locks on the doors, which could only be opened from one side each, and they would need a key card, a password, and the fingerprints of a guard to get through. After that, there were another series of frustratingly identical hallways before he could reach her room. Orion’s room was closer to the dividing wall, but still on the western side of it, separated from Doug. 

Doug wasted every free moment of his time trying to think of some reason he could be taken to the West Wing of the building, imagining far-fetched scenes of breaking away from the guards and making a run for Orion’s room. It kept him distracted from his existence here but after a while even these fantasies started to feel hopeless. His escape was so unlikely that even dreaming about it hurt. What he needed was a miracle.

* * * 

It was a day like any other trapped in a government prison for psychics. A loud voice blared **AWAKE AWAKE AWAKE** until Doug sat up and got out of bed. He moved to his closet to put on a clean jumpsuit, and noted sleepily that he only had one clean set of clothes left, and that the rest had been spattered with various inks, fluids, and what he suspected was some of his own blood. He was greeted at his door by two armed guards, and he followed them down the halls, trailing a few steps behind. He knew that somewhere on the other side of the building, Orion and Ilona were walking down identical hallways, on their way to their own test chambers. Francis was still in his unconscious state, oblivious to his surroundings. Doug frowned and shook his head slightly to dispel the twinge of envy that had tickled the back of his mind. 

The guards in front of him had stopped in front of a door, and one was in the process of unlocking it. Just as the guard got the door open, Doug felt something tugging at the back of his mind. He nearly mistook it as jealousy of Francis again before he recognized it for what it truly was. Doug had felt this specific sensation before, like someone pulling on a thread attached to his skull. He turned around just in time to see a opalescent swirl appear on the wall behind him, revolving and expanding until it resolved itself into a gaping hole. There was sunlight in the background of the portal, actual sunlight. Doug was so dazzled by the light and the soft breeze that was blowing in through the hole at first that he didn’t see the figure standing in the center of it. He was motioning frantically to Doug, and but as the guards turned around he snapped his fingers and the portal winked very suddenly out of existence. The whole thing had happened so quickly that Doug had hardly processed what he had seen before it was gone. 

The guards seemed oblivious, and led him into the test chamber to begin today’s round of pointless experiments. Doug was sure that the supervisors would be fairly displeased with his results from today, he was totally unable to focus on the tasks they gave him. He knew better than to think he had imagined the portal in the wall earlier. How had it gotten there? Who was that boy? He was obviously connected to Doug and the others here, somehow. How did he know where they were? And most importantly, Doug wondered if he could get them out. 

* * * 

Later that night, Doug was lying in his bed, still considering the strange boy he had seen earlier. As he stared off blankly into the darkness, the same swirls of rainbow light shimmered into being in front of him. Doug was sitting upright immediately, and cautiously getting out of his bed. A large crescent moon shone through the portal and the young boy standing in the middle of it motioned to Doug once again. 

“Who are you?” Doug whispered and edged his way closer to the portal. On closer inspection, he noticed that it was dripping, and water was pooling on his floor around it. “Where are you?”

“I’m by a lake, it’s far away from here. You’d be safe. Come on, let’s go,” he was speaking in a low, frantic tone. This little kid clearly understood that they didn’t have much time before the supervisors, discovered them and that they would be in serious trouble if that happened. Doug understood this too, but still he hesitated. How could he leave Orion, Ilona, and little Francis in here? Doug shook his head.

“We need to get the others, I won’t leave them here.” Another thought struck him then, and he dashed to his closet and began to dig through his dirty stained jumpsuits. 

“What are you doing?! we need to go!” The kid was getting increasingly frantic, but Doug had found what he was looking for. He grabbed his notebook and rushed over to the young boy. 

“Can you open a portal to my friends’ rooms?” Doug poked his head partway through the portal and looked more closely at it. It appeared to be made of swirling water, and as he looked past the portal to the other side he realized that the water of the portal was indeed a lake, and the boy was kneeling at the water’s edge. 

“Yeah, I can feel the connections to them too, I can get them, but we have to go now!”

“Fine,” Doug said, and he reached out as if to take the boy’s hand, “but we’re doing it from this side.” He yanked the boy into the portal and the shock of it caused it to slam shut behind him, splashing a decent amount of water into a wide ring on the floor of Doug’s room. 

“What is wrong with you?” the kid hissed at him. He was soaking wet, but clearly furious. “It only works with the lake! Now we’re stuck in here!” 

“Have you tried it with anything other than the lake?” Doug asked. He knew he needed to remain calm and collected in this situation, he was the adult here. He was the one who had to get them all out. But the boy had paused when he asked the question, and the anger had drained out of him immediately. 

“No, I guess not,’ he said softly.

“Come on then,” Doug stood up and helped the boy to his feet, and led him to the small sink in the corner of the room. He pushed the stopper down and turned the taps on, letting the basin fill with water. The kid looked into it and frowned in concentration. Doug watched as he closed his eyes and put one hand on top of the water. In the sink, the image of a very similar living chamber emerged, and the boy opened his eyes.

“Now, how do we fit through it?” he asked, looking up at Doug. Doug shrugged, took a deep breath, and stuck his head in the basin of his sink. 

It seemed that the act of opening the portal had caused the other basin to fill with water as well, and as Doug swiveled his head around, he saw a very welcome sight. Orion, standing a few feet away from the sink and clearly confused to see a head coming out of his sink that, from his perspective, had suddenly turned on and filled itself. When he realized it was Doug, he beamed. 

“Hop on through, we’re getting out of here!” Doug whispered, and pulled his head back through his own sink. A few moments later, Orion’s head popped through, followed by arms, and he pulled himself the rest of the way into Doug’s room. The two boys embraced for a long minute, it was the first time they had truly been in the same place, and they risked a precious few seconds to enjoy it. Doug broke off and looked down at the younger kid.

“We need Ilona next,” he said, and the kid closed his eyes again. Doug plunged his head back through the portal and found the young girl he had seen in his visions staring at him, wide eyed and afraid. 

“I’m going to get us out of here, but you need to stay quiet and you need to get into the sink,” he said in as soothing of a voice as he could manage. She looked around, and moved towards the sink. Doug smiled encouragingly and pulled his head back through the portal. He waited anxiously until he saw a foot pop through his sink. She was coming in upside down, he realized, and rushed to help pull her through, then lowered her to the floor. 

“Hi, I’m Doug. Your name’s Ilona, right?” he asked her. He realized suddenly that he had no idea where she had come from, and that she might not speak english, but then she nodded. “How did they find you?” he asked, and she frowned.

“My teachers were scared of me,” her voice had a light eastern european accent, but his fears had clearly been misplaced. “They called some men, in black suits and guns, and they took me away. We flew in a plane. Now they do tests on me.”

Doug nodded. At least he hadn’t put this girl in this place. He looked at the boy by the sink, and sighed deeply. “Okay,” he said, “now we need to get Francis.”

* * * 

Four people splashed out of the sink in the corner of Project Moloch’s chambers, one after the other. As the last boy was pulled through, the portal he had opened into the sink closed behind him. Doug put the kid down on the floor, and they all rushed over to the bedside of Francis Cardenas. He stared at the many wires and tubes that were connecting Francis and the life support system next to his bed. How much of it could he live without? And for how long? As they stood there contemplating the task of getting this child out alive, alarms suddenly went off overhead. Ilona jumped, and Orion tried to calm her down. They all looked to Doug for orders, and he took a deep breath.

“Okay, Orion, go fill up the sink, as much as you can. Kid,” he turned to the boy, and realized he still hadn’t learned the boy’s name. 

“It’s Jonathan. My name’s Jonathan Ashcroft,” the boy answered Doug’s unasked question. 

“Jonathan. Can you open us up a portal to a hospital? Somewhere far away, but Francis will need a hospital.” He stared at Francis and Jonathan moved swiftly to the sink and began to concentrate. Doug pulled the bags of fluids off the IV stand and laid them down in Francis’s bed, and started to disconnect the electrodes on his head. He could hear the others getting more and more panicked as he tried to figure out how to keep Francis alive as they got through the portal. He swallowed his fear and pulled the boy up out of his bed, he would just have to hope he could survive a few minutes off of life support. More alarms went off as Doug disconnected the last wires from the boy’s arm, his machines blared angrily that his life signs had all gone flat. 

The doors flew open as Doug was hefting francis over to the sink, and what seemed to be every guard in the building swarmed into the room. Two large men in black protective gear took Francis out of Doug’s arms as two more pulled those arms behind him and restrained him. He craned his neck and saw that the same was happening to Orion, Ilona, and Jonathan. The portal in the sink had closed and someone was draining the water out of the basin. They were all carried out of the room as doctors in lab coats rushed in to reconnect Francis to his machines. Doug was carried away down one hall and the other three were carried towards the door to the west wing. They would probably keep Jonathan as far away from the other two as they could, but Doug was still being additionally isolated from them behind that thick steel wall. 

The guards dropped Doug on his bed, and undid the handcuffs they had put him in. They slammed the door behind them and he was alone. There was still a wet circle on the floor, and he noticed it partially overlapped with his bed, and that one corner of the mattress was now soggy. He sighed and looked around his chamber, the prison he had been so close to escaping. Something on the floor near the sink caught his eye, and he moved to examine it closer. He bent down and retrieved his notebook, and smiled despite his situation. He found the pen that he kept beneath his pile of dirty clothes, and wrote **JONATHAN ASHCROFT** at the top of a clean page, and then began to describe the night he had just had.


End file.
